Case Summaries

Criminal Law & Procedure

[02/08] US v. Schneider
In a prosecution for impermissibly dispensing controlled drugs, an order excluding evidence of all but one of the eighteen deaths charged in one count of the indictment and the court's placement of a ten-day limitation on the government's time to present its case is vacated where the district court's ruling effectively dismissed separately charged conduct brought by the government against defendants, and thus impermissibly intruded upon the authority of the executive branch to design a criminal prosecution in the way it deemed most prudent.

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Ethics & Professional Responsibility

[01/14] Johnson v. State of Florida
Defendant's request for postconviction relief is granted and the death sentences vacated and remanded where the newly disclosed evidence shows the following: 1) after defendant was arrested and counsel was appointed, the State intentionally created a situation likely to induce defendant to make incriminating statements to a jailhouse informant in violation of defendant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel; 2) although the prosecutor at defendant's first trial knew that his statements were impermissibly elicited and that his testimony was inadmissible, the prosecutor knowingly used false testimony and misleading argument to convince the court to admit the testimony; and 3) because defendant's testimony was admitted and later used by a different prosecutor at defendant's 1988 trial, and because the State has failed to show that this error did not contribute to the jury's advisory sentences of death, the death sentences are vacated and remanded under Giglio v. US.

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Family Law

[02/08] DG v. DeVaughn
In a class action against the Oklahoma Department of Human Services claiming that the department's agency-wide foster care policies and practices exposed all class members to an impermissible risk of harm, the district court's order certifying a class is affirmed where: 1) plaintiffs presented more than conclusory statements that defendants' agency-wide monitoring policies and practices, or lack thereof, created a risk of harm shared by the entire class; 2) due to the common risk of harm and the common underlying legal theory for asserting that risk, the district court acted within its discretion to find that typicality was satisfied; and 3) the injunction sought by plaintiffs applied to the proposed class as a whole without requiring differentiation between class members.

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Immigration Law

[02/04] Gildernew v. Quarantillo
In an action seeking a declaratory judgment that plaintiff, an Irish national, was entitled to naturalize in the U.S., summary judgment for defendant is affirmed where: 1) the one-year absence bar in 8 U.S.C. section 1427(b) applied both to the period preceding the naturalization interview and the period following the interview; and 2) plaintiff was neither exempt from the continuous residence requirement, nor did he present a set of facts that would warrant an estoppel.

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Injury & Tort Law

[12/11] Whirlpool Corp. v. Camacho
In a products liability action against Whirlpool Corporation, judgment of the court of appeals' that a design defect in an electric Whirlpool clothes dryer caused a fatal fire is reversed as the expert testimony of design defect is legally insufficient to support the verdict.

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Workers' Comp

[01/29] Firemans' Fund Ins. Co. v. Workers' Comp. Appeals Bd.
An order of the Workers' Compensation Appeals Board (WCAB) denying Fireman's Fund Insurance Company's petition for reconsideration regarding a stipulation entered into by plaintiff and the California Insurance Guarantee Association in 2001 is annulled and the matter is remanded where: 1) CIGA's stipulations and a subsequently entered order on the stipulations were not a nullity and void; and 2) the WCAB improperly exercised its discretion under the Labor Code section 5803 to set aside the order entered on the stipulations on the ground of illegality and public policy.

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